The Man Who Wouldn't Die

Olympic hero Rulon Gardner has fallen off trucks, tumbled off tractors, and gotten stuck in a baler. He has been impaled on an arrow, broken his neck, and gashed his knee clean to the bone. He has survived several catastrophic high-speed accidents, endured a frostbitten night in subzero temperatures, and most recently, swam away (barely) from a plane crash in Lake Powell. In between, he pulled off one of the great upsets in sports history and became an American legend. Meet Rulon Gardner, the luckiest man on earth

G-Money was trying to find Ru-dog's toe in the refrigerator so he could show it to me. "Ru, where the heck is your toe?" shouted G-Money. His voice echoed in the virtually empty mansion. Well, almost mansion. It was a manse without the -sion on the East Bench, north of Salt Lake City. Ru was in the process of buying a real mansion down south of the city from his dentist friend, Les, the one who had been with him on the seventh, eighth, and ninth times he almost died. That house had a weight room and a gym and an indoor shooting range. It had high, high ceilings, all the way to Heaven—or so it seemed.

Ru-dog sat calmly in his office now, just off the kitchen. It was strewn with toys: bos of stuff for the snowmobile, stuff for flying, stuff for his boat and for wakeboarding on Lake Powell. Hubcaps for one of his cars. And yet, except for a few oversize beds, two large sectional couches, and plasma-screen TVs everywhere, the house still felt empty.

Ru sat at the computer, trying to check on one of his business concerns, as various online-chat friends kept popping up.

"Hey, sexy, how are ya?"

"You wanna play?"

"What the hell's up, brotha?"

"It's all good," Ru was fond of saying in response to almost anything. It seemed to be his mantra. Friend screwing you on a real estate deal, brother selling out the family farm, someone calling you Shrek online. You could see Ru go dark with that grimace, that flash of psycho-animal in his eye, and then with a quick shake of his head, without a trace of sarcasm, say, "Yeah, but it's all good." The little muscle in his jaw would clench and then release. He'd cover it with a smile. But behind the facade, deep inside that man-child, lived the "real Ru, the Ru of fire and fury," as G-Money put it.

"Check the cheese drawer!" shouted back Ru, a little irritated that G-Money couldn't find his toe.

G-Money—whose real name is Grant and who has been Ru's close friend ever since they met, five years ago at the Olympic training center—had already checked the door shelves, loaded with redundant bottles of ketchup, mustard, and Hershey's chocolate syrup. He'd ferreted among the milk and Pepsi cans and energy drinks, muttering, "Where's that darn toe?" He rooted past two loose eggs and came to a plastic I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! container. "Aha!" he proclaimed, popping his head out of the fridge. "Got it!" He peeled back the lid and pulled out a medicine vial.

Inside was what looked to be a blackened curd, a rogue Cheez Doodle. It wasn't a big toe or a pinkie toe but an in-between toe. It rolled around in formaldehyde like it was lost in the tide. Where it had been chopped from the foot you could see the white of bone and ligament. "Pretty great, huh?" said G-Money.

The rediscovery of his toe brought Ru out of hiding, like a grizzly in spring following the scent of a memory. "Yeah, it keeps changing colors," he said. His own mood ring. It was a gnarly shade of purple-black now. He was wearing sandals, and looking down you could see the spot on his right foot where the toe once had been. It was just a foot minus a toe now, all healed except for the absence. When the frostbite had char-blackened his feet, the doc had said he was going to lose everything below the ankles. Like everyone else, he'd underestimated Ru.

He stood just over six feet and weighed in at about 315, forty pounds over his former wrestling weight. The circumference of his arms was roughly twice that of my legs. He was a whole lotta boy. Prize, prime man-child who had accomplished the kind of impossible reserved for crazy dreams: A once fat Wyoming farm kid, he took out the world's most fearsome Greco-Roman wrestlers, brawling all the way to the Olympic finals, which shaped up to be one of history's great mismatches. His Russian opponent, a man named Aleksandr Karelin, had gone undefeated for thirteen years. Karelin's signature move was a reverse body lift, a maneuver of brute strength in which he hoisted his opponent in the air upside down and slammed him on his back. He'd broken a few necks with it, including Ru's. The thing was, this time around Ru-dog—Rulon Gardner, whose best international finish prior to the Olympics had been fifth—somehow held on to win 1-0, after which, not knowing what to do and not able to emulate the backflips that were de rigueur among wrestling champs, he turned awkward cartwheels in celebration. It was just one moment on the continuum that was Ru-dog's charmed life.

Now he was gazing kind of wistfully at his old toe. "We should auction that thing on eBay," suggested G-Money, a little too eagerly.

Ru-dog looked at G-Money, feigning malevolent disbelief, just to shut him up for a moment. Then gave him a quick playful punch that lifted G-Money off the ground and into the wall. He turned his attention back to the toe. "I've been meaning to get rid of it," he said, "but I just haven't had the time."

I didn't have the heart to point out that it'd been almost five years since he'd lost it—and that most of us wouldn't have asked for it in the first place. No, the toe was more than just another trophy. It was one of those powerful talismans, like skulls on stakes or live sacrifices, meant to keep the Maker from collecting you up too soon.

In fact, just a few weeks ago, he'd survived a plane crash in the middle of Lake Powell, swum two miles, and camped out overnight in frigid temperatures until he was rescued the next morning. Some might have looked at Ru and said he didn't need a midget digit to protect him. Some might have thought he had all the luck in the world to still be alive when he should have died, over and over again. They might have looked at his life and thought it couldn't get better: a gold medal, toys, houses, women, fame. But it still wasn't enough. "I want to go to Heaven," he said to me at one point. "I want to obtain every celestial thing, but I want every worldly thing, too. The problem is they don't go hand in hand."

Time was short. His desire was uncontainable. The computer screen flickered with inviting messages; new packages piled at the door. The toe, like a rare black diamond, went back in its vault, waiting for the day when it might be unneeded.

···

To be sure, Ru was a tough man to kill. He chalked it up to being the youngest of nine, and to growing up hard on the farm, and to being, as he put it, "too stubborn to die." He also credited his Mormon faith. The wise doctor who delivered him, looking down upon a rambunctious, relentless little Ru, pegged it even back then. "Your son," he told Ru's dad, "is going to be accident-prone."

For instance, there'd been one special show-and-tell in third grade. Ru had a practice arrow with a blunt tip and a very sharp arrow, known as a killing arrow, used with a crossbow. The kids were listening to him tell about it, not rapt, but paying some attention, which is more than he usually got. Because of his size as well as a learning disability, Ru was constantly mocked, called Dumbo—and the ever trusty Fatso. So he was a little nervous standing there in front of everyone, and when his turn was over, when he triumphantly went to put the arrows in a closet, he dropped the practice arrow. Quickly reaching down to pick it up, he leaned too far and felt something slide in. He stood up, leaking blood from a wound in his stomach, impaled by the killing arrow in his hand, as if he'd just been plugged in the gut by Injuns. A fraction deeper, the emergency-room doc said later, and Ru might not have made it.

"Always being the snot-nosed little kid," as he put it, Ru often found himself trying to keep up and feeling out of his depth at the same time. Once, when his parents weren't home, the kids decided to drive the pickup down the road to turn off the irrigation water in one of their fields. Ru's sister Marcella, who was 12, took the wheel but was too short to see over the dash and drifted into an oncoming lane, doing about thirty. When Diane, another sister, realized, she jerked the wheel, and 9-year-old Rulon, standing up in back, flipped out of the pickup bed. Worse, it was summer, and he wasn't wearing a shirt. The sisters gathered him off the road and drove him straight to the hospital, where he was subjected to an iodine cleaning to remove the gravel. Ru can remember the stinging sensation even now. For weeks afterward, he had to have help removing his shirt at night because it would stick to his wounds.

Once they healed, there would be more. The family often built outdoor fires, and once Ru got branded by one of his brothers with a hot stick, leaving a permanent scar. Another time, as he chopped kindling, he nearly lopped off his thumb.

And the list went on: He rode his sister's bike into the back of a parked pickup and suffered a concussion. He fell into a baler and was nearly torn to pieces. He cut his leg so deeply that it became infected and took months to heal. In high school, he gashed his knee on concrete, and after his brother applied a little homegrown medicine—pushing a Q-Tip an inch deep into the joint—they went to the emergency room for stitches, and one of the staff ho-hummed, "Hey, Rulon's here again."

The truth was the accidents became part of his conditioning, of his body's socialization into a world of pain. And they made him tough. For every tangle he lost with his brother Reynold, who was a year older, he came back for double. He was like the storm at the window, trying to get in. And for all the time he spent outdoors, for how irrevocably the farm's fortunes rose and fell according to the whims of nature, he learned, like an old soul, to take the long view: that he could ultimately survive anything, all of the burns and gashes and wounds; that one day he'd kick Reynold's ass and the ass of whoever—or whatever—came after him.

···

We were driving from salt Lake up to Star Valley, where Rulon grew up, under a big blue-streaked western sky on a coolish day at the end of March. Ru, Grant, and I were in Ru's black 2000 Audi Quattro with tinted windows and a cracked windshield. In his garage, he had a '68 1/2 Mustang, a Hummer, a Ford pickup, a Harley, and a couple of dirt bikes. But, on a drive like this, the Audi made him happiest. It was low to the road and fast. In some ways, driving it up through the mountain passes to home felt a little like flying.

Upon pickup at the airport earlier, I'd been dropped into Ru's swirling world, as if joining in the middle of a very long conversation. "We're going to teach you how to be a redneck," he declared, grinning at me over in the passenger seat. And with that, I was deputized: Barney to Ru's Andy, Gilligan to Ru's Skipper. Until I left four days later, I would spend nearly every minute in Ru's company. He put me up in an empty bed of whichever house we ended up at (he seemed to own three); he introduced me to his friends and showed me some of his new land. He told me that the movie Brokeback Mountain had ruined the last bastion of American pride—the myth of the cowboy—but then, in his arsenal of dead-on impressions, he did a convincing, if over-the-top, gay man.

As usual, G-Money was irrepressible, couldn't stop talking. He had the features of a New York tough from the 1950s—a slight, muscled body; a flattened nose; cauliflower ears; a scarred lip; and quick, slightly mournful eyes. He'd been a navy man, and after ten years he'd just been cut free. It was his time now to make millions in the auspicious vermilion fields of Mormon-land. He had this habit of narrating Rulon's life, the complexities of Ru, even as Rulon sat by listening. Yes, it was true that Ru-dog was "socially behind." He was "like most people are their freshman year."

"He lives the church," said G-Money. "He could be all NBA about it—with a bunch of secret women everywhere—but he's not."

"For someone making nearly a million a year," said G-Money, "he's a little timid, not seasoned."

More than anything, G-Money loved to discuss Ru's gold-medal upset of Karelin. "History will continue to add more and more luster to that victory," he said.

Ru sat at the wheel, all orbs: his large head resting on his wide shoulders, his rounded stomach dipping to touch his thighs, the biceps of his slabbed arms just floating there, and his cheeks as they rose in a smile. I had an amendment: History will add luster to the way this man eats. Already I'd watched Ru buy his standard gallon of water, two energy drinks, six packets of Skittles, a roll of SweeTarts, one bag of Doritos, and one bag of Smartfood. And we'd gorged on what seemed like half a hog at a highwayside barbecue joint. There Ru had tried to make inroads with a cute waitress of erotically pierced tongue, on behalf of Grant, who was feeling a little sheepish about women given that his marriage had recently kind of blown up on him. Ru had burned through three marriages. These failures weren't something either of them was too happy about or wanted to dwell on. Among some Mormons, including Ru's family, divorce was seen as a spiritual failing, and the boys took that failing hard. Ru, who was 35, and Grant, who was 31, both now spoke of "trying to heal."

"This guy's an Olympic wrestler," said Ru to the waitress, exaggerating Grant's fifth-place finish at the U.S. Team Trials a few years back, in the 163-pound weight division. "He's a dangerous single man." The waitress, not exactly recognizing the hulking gold medalist before her, raised a skeptical eyebrow. More banter ensued: She had a military boyfriend ("My man here just got out of the navy," said Ru. "Lieutenant"). She liked her men a little scrawny ("They don't come much scrawnier," said Ru proudly). She didn't want to give her number ("Then just take his," said Ru, snapping his fingers impatiently while Grant fumbled for a business card). When she left the table to get more corn bread, Ru shook his head, a little disappointed.

"Brother, I can only lead you to the water," he said. "You're the one who has to drink."

···

To find the real Rulon, the Ru of "fire and fury," you had to go back to a time before Sydney, before Karelin. You had to go back to junior year in high school and all those wrestling practices in the Star Valley High School gym, where it was Rulon, fueled by his feelings of isolation and bitterness, versus Reynold, in all his superiority. Day in and day out, a lifetime of rivalry coming to a climax, every day, one trying to finally gain the upper hand, the other trying to maintain it. They were two big boys, teeming with testosterone, teeing off: the clash of titans. Rulon might beat him in a practice, but when it came time for the real wrestle-off to see who would represent the team's varsity in the next meet, Reynold would get in Ru's head and win. Back and forth like this for a season, and a few weeks before they were to wrestle-off one last time to see who would represent the team at regionals and states—with Rulon convinced there was no way he could lose this time—Rulon gashed his leg on a tractor while working in the fields as Reynold sat inside, watching the Super Bowl. Ignoring the injury, Rulon landed in the hospital with an infection, a leg swollen with pus. According to the doctor, the worst-case scenario was amputation.

But Rulon didn't really care about that. He still thought he could wrestle. The biggest letdown came when Coach arrived at Ru's hospital bed on the Sunday before the Monday wrestle-off and said, "It's Reynold's senior year, and you need to get all healed up." Until that moment, Rulon actually thought they were still on—and he was ready to go. Even more amazing, Coach knew he had to show up at the hospital in order to call Ru off, otherwise the kid would have been there, hobbling around in his singlet, frothing to have at it. Reynold won the state championship that year. And something switched inside of Ru. He was sick of being the snot-nosed runty brother, the perennial also-ran. He was sick of being overshadowed and made invisible. With few believers behind him, his belief in himself became fully formed. And so he entered the visible world. Someone might beat him on the mat again, but never would he lose because of self-doubt or fear.

Olympic wrestlers usually come with a cred sheet: NCAA and national championships, few matches ever lost, years of international experience, and intense training. By the time Ru graduated from Nebraska, he was regarded as a good wrestler but not great, though steadily improving. He had no college championship, no aura that surrounded him. And he'd only wrestled folkstyle, which is a particular American quirk in the sport. It wasn't until 1993 that Rulon first wrestled Greco-Roman, in which one is not permitted to score a takedown by attacking below the waist, and with some early successes, kept at it. By the 1996 Olympic Trials, he was a threat, but with a staph infection in his leg again, he missed weigh-ins. He got to watch Karelin—known as "the Madman" for, among other things, once having carried a refrigerator on his back up eight flights of stairs—win his third Olympic gold on television.

Four years later, Rulon won the Olympic Trials. Rather, he'd won it day by day, over the intervening years, slowly grinding, teaching himself as he went, recording the weaknesses of his training partners, gathering slights in his mind to unleash on the mat, surpassing his teammates one by one. Every practice, every second of every practice, he went all the way. Ru remembered Brian "No Neck" Keck laughing at "the little fat kid" training so hard. Oh, he was laughable all right—with his fifty-four-inch barrel chest, unchiseled body, and Teletubby ears—but he wasn't going home.

There was a drill known as "shark bait," in which a wrestler takes the center of a circle and the other wrestlers ring the perimeter, jumping into the pit in tag-team fashion, over time breaking down the "shark." After a point, most sharks just try to hold on, but Ru's attitude was the opposite. He kept repeating to himself: "I'm going to beat all of your asses—and you're going to be damn happy when it's over." And that's exactly what he did. He had the strange capacity to get stronger as he went, his huge oxygenating lungs, the product of a life of hard work lived at altitude, giving him more stamina. And there came a time when few of his national teammates wanted to wrestle him anymore. They were worried for their safety.

"Your worst nightmare as a wrestler," said Grant, "was to give Ru a reason to go psycho." When forced to wrestle him, they did everything they could not to anger him, because when Ru got angry he got that faraway look in his eye and started attacking, surging, muscling his opponent to the mat. "I just tried to get ahead of them, move by move," Ru said.

Even "No Neck" Keck later confessed: The little fat kid had outtrained and outwrestled everyone. He deserved his rich reward. What set Ru apart was that he could tap into some ancient fear—some fear of being left behind, forced to the outside of the circle, or forgotten, some fear of dying—and convert it to the kind of controlled rage, the kind of transcendence one needed to win on the mat. Fear, then, became ferocity.

···

Up through the mountain passes and high valleys running with cold-water streams, that big western sky faded to the melancholic, aswirl in purples and oranges that were finally overtaken by a black moonless night. We were headed to visit Ru's parents, who were both sick but in separate hospitals, his mom in Montpelier, Idaho, where she'd worked for years as a nurse, and his dad in Star Valley. It was looking pretty rough for both of them, and every time his phone rang Ru repeated the announcement: "Yeah, Dad's terminal right now, and we're waiting to see about Mom."

As we drove, Ru kept pointing out parcels of empty land to Grant, wondering aloud what it might take to buy them. "I want to know the appraisal on this one over here on the ridge," he said. Or: "Can't you see a golf course over there someday?" When it came to real estate, his mind never ceased. It beat relentlessly against a future in which Rulon Gardner would win the real-life game of Monopoly, just as he'd won a gold medal. Maybe he'd have $50 million someday. Maybe as you drove to Star Valley, you'd pass his tasteful developments and realize his fine instinct for real estate as well.

You didn't get to be Ru without having a powerful personality. He was immediately likable, wore his patriotism on his sleeve (he had nothing but admiration for our armed forces), played the farm-boy role to perfection, and, of course, his story was an inspiration, a story he'd told over and over again, for kids and corporations across the country—and the world. But he also carried his own powerful motivations, sublimated now in pursuit of the almighty dollar. Everything was still reduced to competition for him. To beating the man standing across from him on the proverbial mat. And, without a way to resolve things physically, on a real wrestling mat anymore, his frustrations and disappointments rode right there with us, too.

"I wasn't very popular," he said. "I had two dates in high school: homecoming and senior prom. And I had few friends."

"My ex-brother-in-law sent me a text message after I survived the plane crash. It said, 'I wish you'd died in Lake Powell.' Nice, huh?"

And then there was his real brother Reynold, who'd gone on to become a two-time heavyweight Pac-10 champion. All these years later, Ru wanted to settle the score from high school. He wanted to wrestle him…now! "Payback for what he put me through," he said. "It sure would feel nice. But his wife won't let us go at it."

Once he got started, it all suddenly came pouring out: the supposed friend now trying to bilk him on some real estate deal, the ex-wives, his father.

Dad was a big hulking man with silver wisps of hair and a gentle drawl. Though there was love, there was also a lacuna between father and son. Ru had spent some difficult years under Dad's no-nonsense rule, never quite living up to expectations. But what had been harder to accept—what was still hard to accept—was the way Reed had always pined for his first wife, the one who'd died suddenly, before he'd married Ru's mom and had eight more children. Throughout his second marriage, Dad had always remembered his first wife's birthday and their anniversary; sometimes he even discussed his ongoing feelings for her while Mom was selflessly raising the kids, especially Ru, who was Mom's baby.

"Once I won the gold, everything was good with Dad," said Ru. "I became his boy."

···

At the Olympics in Sydney, Karelin had a lock on the gold, so the rest were brawling for silver and bronze. Ru beat the Tunisian, the Armenian, and the Italian, and then he wrestled down the Israeli in the semis, until there he was, in the finals against Aleksandr Karelin, whose reverse throw—called the Karelin Lift—was still considered a wonder. Somehow, Karelin hoisted nearly 300-pound men from the down position on the mat up over his head and then pile-drived them down, often for a pin. The only other time Ru had done battle with the Russian was three years earlier, when Karelin had thrown Ru three times on his face and cracked two vertebrae in his neck on the way to a 5–0 victory.

A lover of opera, a writer of poetry, a colonel, a politician and friend of Putin's, Karelin had many nicknames. He was called the General, the Meanest Man in the World, and King Kong, for his scary, brute strength. He was called the Experiment for the fact that no one had ever seen someone that big and powerful mix such speed and skill in such a resoundingly dominant way. Fifteen pounds at birth, he wasn't human, they said: He must have been invented by science. Many of the best wrestlers in the world faced with the prospect of wrestling Karelin allowed themselves to be pinned rather than hurt by him. Speaking of those opponents who considered him a freak of nature, Karelin said, "I train every day of my life as they have never trained a day in theirs."

Sydney was to be the capstone in a perfect career, a fourth gold medal. A raft of Russian dignitaries were on hand, as were Henry Kissinger and Juan Antonio Samaranch, the International Olympic Committee president, who would present the medal to Karelin. Rulon's wife at the time feared he might be literally paralyzed by the Russian.

Roly-poly Ru, a head shorter than his opponent, followed the chiseled 280-pound monster onto the mat. In pictures he has a faraway look walking behind Karelin, looking past him, through him. And then he went out, attacking, pushing, countering. He took every ancient doubt, every age-old taunt, every Wyoming deprivation, and brought them with him, exorcising them for the world to see. He'd begun to warm up almost an hour ahead of the match so that when he and Karelin clinched, he would have a slick sheen of sweat on his body, in hopes that Karelin wouldn't be able to grab hold or ecute his lift as easily.

Meanwhile, Karelin did exactly what he shouldn't have: He acted as though Rulon were invisible. He didn't even remove his sweats or stretch until ten minutes before the match. He gave Ru one splendid hour of growing resentment and animosity, and then once the match began—and once Karelin failed the first three times to raise Ru over his head and body-slam him—Ru just kept chucking and adjusting, kept going after Karelin in a way that Karelin couldn't have expected. At strange angles, stubbornly, without fear. Where Karelin had spent more than a decade intimidating his opponents, Ru wouldn't back down. Locked in a clinch, Ru held on for life, then maneuvered his left leg in between Karelin's legs—a move that might have gone very wrong if it hadn't been so unexpected—while holding and squeezing, a little more then, until Karelin's grip broke, and Ru was awarded a point. There was still five minutes thirty seconds of wrestling left, but as time passed, Ru grew stronger and stronger, the storm at the window, and Karelin clearly had no backup plan. He was spent.

With eight seconds left in the match, Karelin stepped back and put his hands on his hips, conceding. When time expired, the ref lifted Ru's hand, and when he let it go, the first thing Ru did was to make a throwing motion. Later, he said that it was a gesture aimed at anyone who had ever denigrated him: He threw all of their stupid-fat-clumsy incompetence right back at them.

It was about 11 p.m. when we got to the hospital in Montpelier, to Ru's mom. When we entered her room, she was lying quietly with a cool washcloth draped over her forehead. Her body lay motionless, and she had compresses on both legs. She had an oxygen line attached to her nose and bruised arms strung with IVs. In that light, with her strong features and glittering, glassy eyes, she appeared beautiful in a sort of ethereal way. The question was whether her meningitis was bacterial or viral, and everyone was praying it was viral. Ru went right to her and draped a big bear paw over her and said, "Are you good, Ma? Do you wanna have some milk shake? Can you move your toes? Good. Another sip?"

She seemed a little out of it but was smiling. "Today is Monday the twenty-sixth of March," said Ru. "You're fine, Mother. Keep doing the foot ercises."

Grant was always good for comic relief, and he was razzing Ma for just lying around all the time all lazylike while the rest of us worked, and Ru turned to me and said, "Mom tore both rotator cuffs being a nurse, but she can still backhand you."

Talk turned to the farm and how it had been to grow up in Star Valley, a place where Ru's great-great-grandfather Archibald Gardner and his ten wives were among the first settlers. What most would have regarded as hardship Rulon's family had absorbed as their daily way of life, the path God had made for them. Not able to afford a mobile irrigation system—the standard for most farmers—the family used a gravity-flow system, really just a series of forty-foot aluminum pipes that had to be attached, unattached, and moved by hand. One line of pipe had thirty-three sections and ran to a sprinkler that could water forty acres at a time. Even as a young boy, you might be in charge of a field, meaning that every time the pipe had to be moved you had to carry thirty-three sections of pipe to its new location and rebuild it. And because Star Valley has rocky soil, watering was a constant necessity. In midsummer you'd have to wrestle through chest-high hay to get it done, twice a day, at all hours. Or in the driving rain. And then, the next day, you'd wake and have to do it all over again.

It was a hardscrabble existence, Sisyphean, unforgiving. And at 6,000 feet, the valley could be brutal: snow on July 4; ruined crops; frigid, unrelenting winters. And still, the cows needed milking, the pipe needed laying, the fences needed mending, the hay needed haying, the crops needed planting and harvesting, the animals needed feeding, the machines needed fixing. The list went on—and on.

Ma looked as if she might nod off in her bed, all pale and strung up as she was. She still had plenty of fight—and a backhand or two left to deliver—but you could tell she wanted to sleep. "When they get old, people up here live off tanks of oxygen," Ru said later. "You see them all over town, walking around with their tanks. You work so hard for your entire life, and it breaks your body down. And up at this altitude, people just can't breathe. I look at my parents now and think, I'll be where they're at in twenty or thirty years. You know—if I make it that long. So why am I working so hard? My parents have nothing, but they're happy. They have the love of their children."

Now, Ma's youngest son came back around the bed and knelt down near her. His bear paw draped over her body again, and he brought his lips to her ear and started whispering. He kept whispering and whispering, the words pouring forth fervently, with the full, soulful hold of his focus. It wasn't a weird speaking in tongues or anything like that, just one of those intimate moments between a son and a mother, who lay with her eyes closed, smiling. He prayed with her like that for a very long time, with his sister Marcella and Grant and me just sitting there, carrying on nonsensically, then he kissed her and rose.

After defeating Karelin—in a match that became known as Miracle on the Mat—Ru appeared on Leno, Oprah, Letterman. He showed up at the Espy Awards and was photographed with Tiger Woods and Lara Flynn Boyle. He befriended heroes like Garth Brooks and Jason Giambi. He won the prestigious Sullivan Award, given to the country's best amateur athlete. There were parades and city keys, more awards and gifts, including a waverunner from Rosie. He showed up in a "Got Milk?" ad, hoisting buckets of milk while wearing a creamy white mustache. He went on tour, giving inspirational speeches to corporate clients willing to pay up to $15,000 a speech. He wrote his autobiography, titled Never Stop Pushing.

If he didn't entirely believe his own legend yet, if he approached everyone as if he were still the old affectless Rulon Gardner, the farm boy from Star Valley seeking a little love and approval, he had seen through to a life beyond the Valley. And that life included proving he was no fluke by winning World Championships the following year and then preparing to defend his gold medal at the 2004 Games.

Where he once clandestinely sold the Cuban cigars he'd collected at an international meet in Havana in order to support himself, his new-won fame now turned on a spigot of income flow. His father had once lived over him, always on the verge of bankruptcy, and here he was, Rulon Gardner, a national treasure having made $250,000 the year after he won his gold—and the number was climbing. ("He spent nine minutes on the mat with that ugly man from Russia," Reed Gardner jokingly told a reporter. "I spent fifty to sixty years on the farm, and I don't have nothin'.") So, he'd begun to accumulate toys, to live a grown-up version of the childhood he'd missed, with motorcycles and guns and a shiny snowmobile he took into the mountains near Star Valley. Of course there was no way for Ru to moderate his frenetic relentlessness. He pushed everything to the max.

Extreme snowmobiling can be as harrowing as any sport invented, man and machine against the mountain, finding aggressive routes up pitched faces, jumping rivers, riding into deep powder, and searching for perfect isolation. There are breakdowns and strandings, sudden submersions in icy water and the constant challenge of righting a 500-pound machine after having fallen chest-deep in snow—all in quest of some banana-cream vision out there through the trees, up on the ridge, gazing all those silver miles over Wyoming. In other words, it combines all the ingredients that make someone like Rulon Gardner tick: high-octane risk-taking, brute physicality, farm-boy ingenuity, nimble coordination, and conflict reduced to its simplest denominator, survival.

In February 2002, Ru went out snowmobiling with two friends in the Bridger-Teton National Forest, in Wyoming, thirty minutes from his home. They cruised the high peaks and winding valleys for a couple of hours until Ru peeled off, alone, into a gully of virgin snow near the head of the Salt River, "to play a little," as he put it. Shooshing down into the gully, he had no inkling that he wouldn't be able to get out for seventeen hours. He was wearing a T-shirt, sweatshirt, and fleece pullover, having left his jacket behind. The sun had begun to dip in the sky; the temperature, which had been twenty-five degrees, began to plummet. Over the course of the next hours, Rulon tried to work his way out of the gully. His machine didn't have the power necessary to take him back up the route he'd just dropped down. Worse, as he crisscrossed the Salt River in an increasing panic, occasionally submerging his sled, he found himself in a narrow gully where, ultimately, his machine became stuck between two boulders. During the journey, he had to repair a belt and fell four times into the river, soaking his clothes. ("Once I got wet, I knew I had about an hour before frostbite and hypothermia," he said.) Finally, as night fell, he dug out a spot among the trees and waited for his own inevitable death. Sometime around 2 a.m., he heard the roar of snowmobiles, but then the sound faded. "I thought I was rescued," he said. "They came within 200 yards, and I was yelling, but they couldn't hear me over their engines—and then they just turned away." He slipped in and out of consciousness, having visions: first of Jesus and then of his brother Ronald, who died at the age of 14 of a rare blood disease. (When his leg had to be amputated because of gangrene, Ronald said, "It's okay, Dad, I can wrestle with one leg.") Time crawled. What helped keep him alive was the thought of his family and friends finding him frozen there, a lifeless face with eyes open like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

The next morning he was spotted by a search plane, and two hours later a helicopter landed, and he was able to crawl across the snow and climb in. His core body temperature had dropped into the 80s, and both his feet were so badly frostbit it would take four surgeries and three months before he could walk. Most believed he'd never wrestle again, but Ru, the survivor, had other ideas about that, too.

What most of the searchers remember of that night was just how bone-cold it was—minus twenty-five degrees—and how, even after an hour in it, all they could think about was getting warm. What the pilot of the search plane remembers was that, circling overhead for the two hours it took for the helicopter to arrive, he was "watching someone die," a behemoth of a man covered in a suit of ice, zig-zagging through the snow, at one point standing in the middle of the river, waving, then down in the snow, semiconscious.

"We're all working for that Big Dream," said Ru. He was talking about financial stability, of course. And over at Rulon's Burger Barn, Ru and G-Money were now throwing a lot of figures in the air, and not all that discreetly, either. They were the first to admit that they were chasing their own schemes. They seemed to have it wired, too: hard-money funds, real estate, oil wells, dental clinics, capital leasing. There were complex ways you could buy a $2 million house, never move in, turn off the water and electricity, and draw $50,000 a year from the property.

"The sophisticated investor has private placements," said G-Money to Ru.

It was amazing how the law actually helped the rich get richer, said G-Money. It had been a recent revelation to him. After Grant's navy days of everything-by-the-book, the free-for-all of private enterprise was thrilling, working with his brother to manage a $15 million fund, acting as Ru's de facto adviser, and suddenly running with a high-powered group of moneyed Mormons while still driving a beat-up Plymouth. As for Ru, like with everything, he was in it to win.

In fact, Rulon's Burger Barn was as much another one of Ru's investments as it was a place to ercise his actual and existential hunger when he came to visit Star Valley. A convenience store with a fast-food grill, some tables, and benches, the place's biggest cachet was its Wall of Fame, covered with photographs of everyone and anyone who had been able to down the Rulon Burger, a $16.99 meal that included a one-and-a-half-pound burger (it took twenty minutes to cook and was served on a bun baked in a nine-inch cake pan), large fries, and a forty-four-ounce soft drink. If you could get it all down in less than twenty minutes, you went up on the wall. And the record, of course, belonged to Rulon himself: eight minutes thirty seconds.

G-Money was convinced that he could do it; after all, twenty minutes was a lot of time, wasn't it? But for a chef's salad at lunch, he hadn't eaten all day; so he sidled up to the counter to order his meal, then went and sat alone at a table, visualizing. When I asked him how he was doing, he said, "Man, I'm nervous. Do you think I should go buns first and then meat or all of it together?"

Meanwhile, Rulon didn't seem to have a care in the world. He was chatting with some of the young employees, downing an oversize chocolate shake. He walked over to the counter and glanced sneakily at G-Money, who sat a ways away, back to everyone, rubbing his temples. Ru quietly ordered the Rulon Burger, too.

When their meals arrived together, G-Money shot Ru a surprised look, then went about his business. He systematically cut the hamburger into quarters. He eyed the mountain of fries and the forty-four-ounce soft drink, looked at the waitress who stood there with a stopwatch, took a deep breath, and said, "Go!"

Ru watched him for a while. G-Money was off to a decent start but seemed to bog down pretty quickly. He'd take a bite, masticate for a while, take a sip of soda, and lurch onward. Ru sucked the last of his shake and turned to his meal with a sly smile. G-Money, with a mouthful, started shaking his head. Couldn't one eat a hamburger without Ru turning it into the Olympic Games again?

What transpired next was the most impressive, disgusting display of competitive food inhalation I've ever witnessed. Ru started jamming beef and bread and fries down his gullet. At one point, he seemed to have tears in his eyes from eating so much. He breathed only through his nose in order to maximize his intake. His burger and heaping fries were vanishing before our eyes, while G-Money's seemed to be multiplying. One might have surmised that Ru'd been here before, orbed cheeks like a blowfish, looking down at his plate, then at G-Money's, which was still more than half full, then back at his own again—shoveling, stuffing, swallowing.

He had those faraway eyes, that bottomless want. He didn't look up again until he was done. He missed his own record by thirty seconds.

The most recent brush with death had come a few weeks earlier. Rulon's voice was still hoarse from the chest infection he'd suffered, and sometimes it went out altogether, but otherwise he was fine.

They'd boarded a Cirrus 22 aircraft at about 11 a.m. out of Spanish Fork, Utah. It was Ru—and Les, whose mansion Ru was planning to buy, and Les's brother Randy. In training for his pilot's license, Ru flew up to Lake Powell, because they wanted to take a look at Randy's houseboat. On the way back, Randy was at the controls. It was his Cirrus. They were down low for a while, climbed up over the canyon walls, and when it all opened out into a big bay, came down again until they were about fifty feet off the water. Randy, an experienced pilot, was setting the headings and barometric pressure and compass. And the plane drifted down, doing about 150 miles per hour, when the wheels caught on the surface of the lake.

Ru thought he was dreaming. This isn't happening, he kept repeating to himself. They were sinking, but it wasn't happening. He undid his harness, grabbed his coat and wallet, and leapt out of the plane into forty-four-degree water. But it wasn't happening. He started to drown, but that, too, wasn't happening. He yelled to Randy and Les, "I can't make it," and went under. He popped back up and said, "I'm going to die." And Randy yelled, "Get rid of your stuff!" But at first Ru wouldn't. He hit his head on impact, and the concussion seemed to make him loopy. His wallet had everything in it, including a gold ticket he'd been given by a chocolate company after winning the gold medal, one that allowed him an endless supply of free Wonka Bars.

"It's either your wallet or your life," Randy screamed, and though none of it was really happening, Ru finally let his stuff go, kicked off his shoes. "On your back," Randy yelled. And so he got on his back. They were two miles from land. Ru didn't question, he just started stroking. This doesn't make any sense, he thought. But just keep swimming. If you die, you die. But if you continue and swim to shore, and it's real, then you'll be at shore.

Two hours later, having lost all feeling in his body, Ru came to the beach where Randy and Les had arrived before him. That's when he knew it was happening, when he lay there in the sand unmoving for ten minutes. And that's when he got up and found Randy and Les. Les was doing okay, but Randy had very little motor function, no ability to speak. And Les had begun to panic. "Rulon," he said, "you've been here before. Can we make it?" Ru looked at him and said, "Yeah. I know we can make it."

Swimming to shore, Randy had shucked all of his clothes, Les still had a shirt, and Rulon had his pants and shirt. With the sun down now, Ru and Les built a little stone wall. Les lay down on top of Randy, draped his shirt over both of them, and breathed on his brother, to try to keep him warm. Meanwhile Ru lay next to them, and between Ru's body and the wall, Randy and Les were protected from the wind. The temperature dropped to twenty-five degrees, Ru coughed up blood all night, and none of them slept for fear of falling unconscious. They just kept up a patter: You good? You good? Hey, wake up!

At about 4 a.m., Les said, "I didn't think this could be half as bad as that swim, but it's worse."

And Ru said, "Each man has his battle: It is what it is."

So what was the battle for? When he was lost on the mountain, when he came shoulder to shoulder with the beast, when he nearly drowned and came back again to that beach, the one without plasma TVs, what was it that he met there? Fear? His dead brother? God, finally?

Ru just wasn't sure. He said that the way he beat Karelin was he never thought about that hulking force as Karelin. It was just a test, to see where he was at in this human life and how far he had to go. He'd really been wrestling against himself. In those fleeting moments between life and death, up against an entity that sought your demise, what you found was yourself again, full of gratitude and beneficence, stripped down to this pure jewel: the desire to live.

When the sun came up, a plane passed overhead without seeing them, and then sometime later came the sound of boats. A bass tournament in progress. No one ever fished in this part of Lake Powell, too deep for bass, but for some reason one boat came across to a nearby cove—the man would later refer to it as a metaphysical pull that brought him—and Randy, with his wits back, rose and started running, yelling, "We have this emergency. Can you help us?"

So they were picked up, and clothed, and brought back to civilization, where they called their families. Ru left a message on Grant's machine. "Hey, brotha," he said matter-of-factly. "Hey, I just wanted you to know that we crashed into Lake Powell yesterday, and we swam two miles and huddled up like puppies through the night, and we survived. We're okay, we're fine. We were discovered this morning. We're alive. I'll see you when we get back, man. Bye."

There were more high jinks. We were going to go flying, but thankfully the weather turned lousy. We watched some of Ru's favorite video clips on the Internet, like "Infrared Fart" and a clip that showed an actual race down a runway between a Porsche, a motorcycle, and a jet. There was a basketball game at Rulon's house-to-be later, in which Rulon ripped the ball from Les's young son in order to score a basket. (Later, with the boy in tears, Ru apologized.) And then a group of about five guys laid out some gym mats, Ru took the middle, and they did a round of "shark bait," switching off every two minutes or so. The other wrestlers, sitting on the sidelines, said things like:

"He could kill us all."

"It's amazing how he tripods his weight."

"His lungs go forever."

"He's too strong—and he just gets stronger."

Ru encouraged me to suit up so that we could do battle, but honestly, sizing our near 150-pound difference in weight and having three kids that needed a father—one not in full traction for the next half year—I took a polite pass, knowing he would have disassembled me.

I did agree to go snowmobiling with him, though. On the morning we went, Ru ate a light breakfast of two corn dogs, a cheeseburger with ham on it, and a large basket of Tater Tots. And then we were off.

We had a lot of candy on board and three snowmobiles, one supercharged with nitrous oxide, like drag racers use. Grant and I were more or less beginners, but Ru led us deep into the woods, down into gullies, up onto ridges. I fell off my sled a few times and got stuck up to my waist, trying to keep the sled from crushing me. As we went, Ru kept peeling off: He jumped a river. He climbed a sheer face in a bowl that must have been forty degrees. On that climb, he punched the nitrous-oxide button and porpoised his way through the deep snow. It looked as if he would fall backward at any moment. It was scary and thrilling just to watch.

After about two hours, way back in there somewhere, the weather turned particularly nasty: one of those freak western snowstorms, a whiteout, really, with thunder and lightning going off all around us. We had to get out of there, but first Ru wanted to race. G-Money took up the challenge, and I stood off to the side and motioned Ready, set, go. The two of them rocketed off into the murk, thunder rumbling, and it occurred to me that if we didn't get going soon we might not get out for a while. When I caught up with them, however, I came upon a scene of wonder.

Ru had won the race, and now they were off their sleds, two grown men, wrestling in the snow. A silent shriek of lightning went off over their heads. And they couldn't have cared less. Ru picked up G-Money and threw him into a drift; G-Money rose and tried to use some martial arts on Ru, kicking him once on the side of the leg, which only landed Grant back in the snow. They locked one last time, covered in white, Ru-dog about to go Abominable on G-Money. Watching them, I recalled an earlier conversation with Ru about whether he thought he had nine lives. "Maybe," he said. "But really I feel like I'm limitless. I can't be destroyed." The good Lord keeps letting me come back. Exactly why, I have no idea. That's the scary part."

Now Grant lay in the snow, having surrendered. Ru lurked over him, smiling in orbs. The murk thickened. Lightning crackled. Armageddon came forth. And it was all good.

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